This movie came out early in Taiwan and due to various scheduling conflicts I had to see it on opening night. Taiwan is not a fan of Star Wars - that is true. The girl sitting next to me fell asleep.

This is a spoiler review since I cannot stop thinking about it.

There are a few major plot points in this movie that stand out to me:

• Kylo Ren kills Snoke and becomes Supreme Leader
• Rey’s parenthood is a fake plot point - her parents are nobodies
• Luke dies at the end

WTF Moments

I give every movie 3 WTF’s, a WTF meaning that if they have to create a contrived, stupid plot point that makes me say “WTF”. Do three of those and I’m out. I had 4 with this movie.

The major trouble issue with the movie is that the Resistance and its one small fleet is being chased by the First Order’s “Dreadnaught” (a super Star Destroyer) and they cannot escape into lightspeed. But for … some reason I guess the star destroyers cannot blow up the cruiser. They can just slowly chase it. It is weird - I remember telling my friend that it was like watching a snail being chased by a bunch of slugs. This is my first WTF.

Early in the movie, a missile blows up the room with Leia in it and she gets sucked out into space, presumably dead. I assumed this was a new plot point because Carrie Fisher died. Awkward but understandable. But then halfway through she uses the Force to bring herself back to the spaceship after surviving 15 minutes in a vacuum. This is my second WTF?!

There is some sort of tracker that can track them. Finn and Rose (the Asian) need to find a codebreaker to break a code so that they can get into the Dreadnaught and destroy the code. This was my third WTF?! This was a contrived random subplot that turned out to be as terrible as I expected it to be.

The last one I had was Yoda showing up again after Rey leaves Luke to return to the Resistance. In this scene, Luke is about to set fire to the Jedi Temple with all of its books. But before he does it, Yoda appears. The only thing that I can think is that he looks so bad. He looks like someone drew him. The CGI was terrible.

Truly Shocking

On the other hand, killing Snoke I think was such a shocker that I have to take a WTF right off. Everyone has been talking about Snoke and speculating about who he might be. The one thing that they never ever could have guessed was that they would just kill him right off the way they did. I had been so shocked that I gasped in the theater. And judging by the look he had on his own face when it happened, he was as shocked as I was.

Nice Shocks

Luke’s big scene was really good. The Resistance has been chased by the First Order to a white planet like Hoth (salt, not ice). They bring a bunch of AT-ATs and a big door cannon. Finn and Rose try to attack the cannon but they fail and the cannon works. The two are injured - whereupon Rose kisses Finn. That was random.

Anyway when things seem doomed, Luke appears, seemingly following Rey from the island, and faces down all those AT-ATs. It is a good scene. The twist is that he was never there at all. He uses the Force to astral project himself across light years.

Since Kylo Ren is the new Supreme Leader, he tells the AT-ATs to stop and shoot the ghost Luke. At first all the ATATs fire lasers at him and it blows up a big mushroom cloud. General Hux is like, “Kylo! Control yourself! This obsession with Luke is really unhealthy!” but Kylo is like, “Get Force-choked, dude”. Kylo then tells them to lower himself personally down to face the guy one on one. Hux is again like, “you are acting really irrationally, dude” and Kylo throws him across the cabin.

I like that Hux and Kylo don’t like each other. And I also like that now that Snoke is dead, Kylo is the only guy who can Force-choke and so he’s the top guy. I also see Hux’s point here - forcing the First Order to do these irrational things for a Moby Dick obsession is pretty inefficient. But you know, just one guy can Force Choke right now.

Anyway, you do not know that Luke ain’t actually there, which makes it hard to explain the physical hugs and kisses he’s given to people before coming out to the showdown. It’s weird.

The Music sucked

I know John Williams is the best film composer in the world but this entire series (ep 7 and 8) is way over-scored. There’s loud music throughout the whole movie and it’s just annoying after a while. I do not need some rousing song whenever someone is getting into a spaceship.

Conclusion

Killing off Snoke was the most interesting part of the movie hands down. I am curious as to how they are going to handle the series going forward now that Luke is dead in the story and Leia is dead in … real life.